"to rule" and "the stars" (Gen 1:16)

Reading through the story of creation

the big light to rule over the day and the small light to rule over the night

אֶת־הַמָּא֤וֹר הַגָּדֹל֙ לְמֶמְשֶׁ֣לֶת הַיּ֔וֹם וְאֶת־הַמָּא֤וֹר הַקָּטֹן֙ לְמֶמְשֶׁ֣לֶת הַלַּ֔יְלָה

As we discussed last time, “the big light”  is of course the sun and “the small light” is the moon.  (Why are sun and moon not explicitly mentioned here?  See the previous post for a discussion of that question.)  The standard English translations here like to say “the greater light” and “the lesser light,” but the Hebrew words are simply “big” (gadol) and “small” (qaton). 

Note to Hebrew learners:  These are the same words still used today in Modern Hebrew — but Modern Hebrew prefers qatan for the masculine singular, while that form is much rarer in the Bible.

Note to people who are irritated by my using q to transliterate the sound you think of as k:  “Iraq” used to appear in English as “Irak” — do you prefer that?  Anyway, the point of the transliteration is to distinguish ק (q) from כ (k), because the Bible’s original readers and hearers did not confuse these sounds.  And of course, as you can more or less see, q and ק are actually the same letter but at different times of their lives.

We now resume our regularly scheduled post.  

I’ll talk much more about “the big light” and “the small light” next time, when I intend to discuss how rabbinic tradition too reads the text extremely closely.  I haven’t forgotten the stars — we’ll get to them before this post is over — but for now I want to look at this new task that the sun and moon (as I’ll call them) are being given.  It is the task of rulership.

I have translated that they are “to rule,” but the text actually uses a noun instead of a verb.  They are made for the “dominion” or “governance” of night and day.  The Hebrew word is מֶמְשֶׁ֫לֶת, the construct form of מֶמְשָׁלָה.   (“Construct” form means that the noun has a sort of trailer hitch which must be connected to another noun: memshalah, “governance”; memshélet, “governance of.”  See Lecture 13 of my Hebrew course for more detail on this.)  ממשלה is a noun from the root משל ‘to rule, govern’, the same word used in Hebrew today for “the government.” 

There’s one more linguistic distinction that’s important to make here.

Joseph’s brothers, hearing his dream of their sheaves bowing down to his, object indignantly, “Are you going to reign [הֲמָלֹ֤ךְ תִּמְלֹךְ֙] over us?  Do you expect to rule [מָשׁ֥וֹל תִּמְשֹׁ֖ל] us?” (Gen 37:8).  Here, the two verbs, מלך and משׁל, are synonyms.  And indeed a king can “rule.”  But only a king can “reign” — and the sun and the moon, though being given quasi-political power here, are specifically not being given kingship.

By the end of the chapter, humans too will be given some governing power on earth, but the word used there comes from still a third, much less common root.  Although this is not a major subject of the book of Genesis, once we get out of the Torah and get closer to something that looks like history, we will find the Bible full of discussions about rulership. Keep an eye out for the distinction between “king” and “ruler.”

Up to now, God has (implicitly) been the ultimate ruler.  Now, just as we saw God giving the job of separating light and darkness over to the “great lights,” he is also explicitly giving them the rulership of the earth.  If I may extrapolate, they are to be God’s viceroys on Earth, ruling it from the Sky, out of reach of human power but aware of everything that will happen below. Remember that Deut 4:19 says they were made for the other peoples (but not the Jews) to worship.

and the stars וְאֵ֖ת הַכּוֹכָבִֽים׃

As we’ll discuss in more detail next time, this section is not really about astronomy.  But it’s clear that there are stars in the night sky, and this is how they got there.  The Hebrew word is actually somewhat strange, and its etymology is unclear.  R. E. Clements, in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, notes:

The noun represents a reduplicated form of the element kb; kabkab developed into kawkab, which in turn became kôḵāḇ. The precise meaning of this verbal root in Proto-Semitic must remain conjectural.

It’s interesting that in Psalm 136, the extended hymn of praise for God that tracks the Torah but with some surprising gaps (which perhaps I’ll discuss on my WordPress blog one day) adds the stars as well, but in a way that completely wrecks the rhythm of the poem:

7        Who made the great lights …

8        the sun to dominate the day …

9        the moon to dominate the night …

is how it should have gone if v. 9 were to match the rhythm of every other verse in the psalm; but here is how we actually find it:

7        Who made the great lights …

8        the sun to dominate the day …

9        the moon and the stars to dominate the night …

In Psalm 136, it would seem that the stars are an afterthought, perhaps added in by some pedant who was uninterested in the esthetics and wanted to correct the poet’s “mistake.”  Are the stars an afterthought in our chapter as well?  There is no poetry here — but also rather little astronomy.  We’ll talk more about that, with the help of rabbinic literature, next time.